SLPP Minority Leader Looses Woefully, You Won’t Believe What Happened In Her Home Village

When the SLPP Member of Parliament, Dr. Bernadette Lahai lost the National Women Leadership election to Mrs. I J Kabbah at the party’s National Delegates Conference in Kenema in 2009, the agro scientist had hope that things would change for the better.

True to form, she returned to the House for three consecutive times as elected representative of the people of Constituency 13, Kenema District three years after that painful defeat.

And through the intervention of the 2012 SLPP Presidential candidate, Rtd. Brig. Julius Maada Bio, Dr. Lahai was made the Minority Leader, the first female in the political history of Sierra Leone to lead a major political party in parliament.

Now, however, it appears Dr. Lahai has started the bitter exercise of counting her days out of parliament with reports that most of those the SLPP MP supported for positions in the lower level election in her constituency overwhelmingly lost.

According to Global Times sources, supporters of the Minority Leader are said to have lost ten out of twelve sections in Constituency 13, and in further blow to her parliamentary career, Dr. Lahai’s candidates even lost all three sections in her home village of Yumbuma over the weekend.

She returned to Kenema after that electoral defeat shattered and rattled, an eye witness told Global Times. Meanwhile, the Political Parties Registration Commission (PPRC) on Sunday put a temporary hold on the conduct of the lower level elections in Kenema.